SPEECH 



OF 



Hon. ELIHU ROOT 



SECRETARY OF STATE 



AT 



UTICA, NEW YORK 



NOVEMBER 1. 1906 



C. F. SuDWARTH, Printer 

Washington, D. C. 

19 6 



."^7, 



By transfer 
The White House 
March 3rd, 1913 



My Friends and Neighbors: 
j A demagogue is one who for selfish ends seeks to curry 
/ favor with the people or some particular portion of them 
/ by pandering to their prejudices or wishes or by playing 
on their ignorance or passions. 

We are witnessing in the State of New York one of 
those tests of popular government which often have 
come in the past and always will come when a skilful 
demagogue attempts to get elected to office by exceeding 
all other men in the denunciation of real evils and in 
promises to cure them. Honest and well-meaning voters, 
smarting under the effects of political or social or busi- 
ness wrongdoing, naturally tend to sympathize with the 
man who expresses their feelings in the most forcible and 
extreme language and who promises the most sweeping 
measures of reform ; and in the excitement and heat of 
public indignation they are sometimes in danger of for- 
getting that he who cries "stop thief" the loudest may be 



2 

merely seeking his own advantage, may be worthless as 
a leader, may belong to the criminal class himself. 

The enemies of popular government have always as- 
I serted that the great mass of a people, and particularly the 
/ working people, could not be trusted to reject appeals to 
passion and prejudice and follow the dictates of sober 
reason, to distinguish between mere words of violent 
denunciation and extravagant promise on the one hand 
and proved capacity for useful and faithful service on the 
other, and that their suffrage would always go to the 
most violent and extreme agitator. 

The believers in popular government have always an- 
swered that in a country where universal education goes 
with universal suffrage the great mass of the people, and 
particularly those who are doing honest work, can be 
depended upon to inform themselves carefully and to 
think soberly and clearly about political questions and 
that their plain, strong, common sense will surely detect 
and reject the self-seeking demagogue, however violent 
his denunciation of wrong and however glowing his 
promises of redress, and approve the genuine man, the 
competent man. even though he may not promise so 
much or puff himself so much or use such violent lan- 
sfuasre. 



3 

I firmly believe that the contention of the friends of 
popular government is right ; I believe that the people of 
this country and of this State, under our system of uni- 
versal suffrage and universal education, are sure to come 
out right in the long run. Nevertheless it can not be 
doubted that many working men in this State, good and 
honest men who are entitled to respect and who wish to 
do the best thing possible for their country, are about to 
strengthen the enemies and weaken the friends of popular 
government all over the world by voting for Air. Hearst, 
who is just the kind of a demagogue that I have de- 
scribed. 

He is indeed an especially dangerous specimen of the 
class because he is enormously rich and owns newspapers 
of wide circulation, and he can hire many able and active 
men to speak well of him and praise him in print and in 
speech and in private conversation. 

Not only is the cause of popular government in danger 
of suffering injury and discredit from the vote for Mr. 
Hearst, but genuine reform, the real practical redress 
of the evils complained of by the people, is in danger of 
being weakened and brought to naught by this attempt 



4 
of Mr. Hearst to get himself elected governor of New 
York. 

The evils which have come with the enormous in- 
crease of corporate wealth in recent years are real and 
serious ; there have been many outrageous practises which 
ought to be stopped and many wrongdoers who ought 
to be punished. That should be done, not by lynch law 
but by the intelligent and wise action which befits a self- 
governing people, determined always to maintain the rule 
of law, by reforming the laws where they are defective, 
and enforcing the laws with fearless vigor against rich 
and poor alike, and for the protection of rich and poor 
alike. 

Both of these require a high degree of intelligence, 
skill, and experience; declamation and denunciation and 
big headlines in the newspapers will not do the business. 
It is easy to cry "down with the corporations," but cor- 
porations are merely the forms through which the greater 
part of our enormous business is transacted ; they are 
not formed by special privileges to a few; they are free 
to all ; anybody can form a corporation by signing and 
filing a paper, just as anybody can form a partnership. 

And the great mass of our business people, especially 



5 
those engaged in manufacture, are doing their business 
through corporate form; our enormous manufacturing 
industry could not be carried on in any other way. If 
you destroy corporations, you close your mills and your 
furnaces, you stop the payment of wages, you destroy 
the purchasing power of the wageworkers, you reduce 
the sales of our merchants and the market for farm pro- 
ducts. Corporations are not bad in themselves, but the 
managers of some of them and of many of the greatest 
ones have used them as opportunities for wrongdoing, 
if not criminal wrongdoing. 

The thing needed is to cut out the wrongdoing and 
save the business, and these corporations are of so many 
different kinds, engaged in so many kinds of varied and 
complicated business, so intimately connected with all 
the production and trade and prosperity of the country, 
that the same kind of patient, experienced, and discrimi- 
nating skill is needed for the process that the surgeon 
needs in cutting out a tumor from the human body and 
saving the life of the patient. 

Now, this process of intelligent and effective redress 
of wrongs is going on; great and substantial progres? 
has been made in it ; laws are being reformed so as to 



6 

meet the present evils ; laws are being enforced with vigor 
and success ; malefactors are being punished according to 
law and not against law; skill and wisdom and efficiency 
and honest purpose never surpassed in the history of 
this or any other country have put their hands to the task 
and are pressing it forward with untiring energy. 

The most conspicuous and fit representative of this 
great and beneficent work in this State is Charles E. 
Hughes. There was never occasion to .feel more proud 
of the great profession to which Hamilton and Marshall 
and Webster and Lincoln and Tilden belonged than when 
through the long and weary months of the insurance 
investigation with patient and untiring industry, with 
courage, skill, and honesty, he followed step by step the 
clues which led through all the complicated affairs of the 
great companies to the laying bare of official wrongdo- 
ing. Neither wealth, nor power, nor social position, nor 
political influence turned him aside one hair's breadth 
from his course; nor did any thought of himself, any 
desire for popularity, any taint of self-advertising or self- 
glorification obscure his vision or affect his conduct. He 
was the skilled and single-minded instrument of inex- 
orable justice. 



7 

When the facts were all uncovered he arranged them 
and stated them so plainly that a child could understand 
their deep significance, and then wisdom of no common 
order guided his judgment upon the legislative remedies 
for which the facts called. This work was worth more 
than millions of stareing headlines and clever sensational 
editorials, more than a wilderness of promises from one 
who seeks to barter promises for votes. I can not be- 
lieve that the hundreds of thousands of policy holders 
in this State are not grateful for this service, or that all 
good citizens who justly resented the wrongs which he 
uncloaked would not be glad to have such a man em- 
powered to continue just such service in all departments 
of our State government by election to the governorship 
of the State. 

The most conspicuous and fit representative of this 
same great and beneficent work in the Federal Govern- 
ment is Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United 
States. Let me state some of the corporate evils with 
which he has undertaken to deal, not all, but the princi- 
pal ones. 

Many great corporations have united in the forma- 
tion of so-called trusts to get rid of competition, create 



monopolies of the business in which they are engaged, 
restrict production, and put down the prices at which 
they purchase raw material and put up the prices at which 
they sell their products. 

2. Many great corporations and trusts have under- 
taken to crush out their remaining competitors by unfair 
competition, and especially by securing lower rates of 
freight from the railroad companies for their products 
than their smaller competitors, and as the railroads are 
bound by law to give the same rates to all shippers this 
unfair advantage has taken the form of secret rebates. 

3. Many railroad companies have exercised their ar- 
bitrary power to fix their rates by arranging them in 
such a way that even without giving rebates they have 
favored the large shippers in special localities and have 
been unreasonable toward small shippers in other locali- 
ties. By these unfair means the big, rich corporations 
have been continually driving the small, weak men to 
the wall, taking away their business and increasing their 
own wealth. 

4. The managers of many great corporations, not satis- 
fied with the natural increase of successful business, have 

1 enormously increased their capitalization beyond either 



9 

their investment or the value of their property fairly used 
in business. Much of the watered stock has been sold 
to innocent investors, much of it has been secured by the 
managers themselves, through various devices, for in- 
sufficient consideration. These greatly excessive capitals, 
and the necessity of paying interest upon them, have 
stood as barriers against the reduction of transportation 
rates or the prices of products to a point which would 
secure fair business returns. 

5. The offending corporations have clothed their vast 
and complicated business affairs with a mantle of secrecy, 
so that it has been almost impossible to get at the facts 
of their offending and quite impossible for any weak, 
private person or small corpoiation who has been injured 
by them. 

6. One of the great obstacles to the redress of these 
evils has been the unwillingness or inability of the States 
to deal with them. It is difficult for any one State to 
control corporations doing business in all the States. The 
State can not control interstate commerce at all. Many 
of the States have by their laws as well as by their ad- 
ministration facilitated and encouraged the objectionable 
practises. 



10 

Let me tell you that our own State is not blameless 
in this respect, and that we need a Hughes at Albany 
with the skill and courage to deal with that subject as he 
dealt with the insurance subject. On the other hand, 
the Federal Government has been met at every turn by 
the difficulty of controlling State corporations in the 
exercise of the powers conferred upon them by the State 
in which they were created. 

Against these battlements of wrong the President has 
charged with all the energy and sincere conviction of his 
nature; he has waged and is waging open warfare not 
against wealth, but against ill-gotten wealth; not against 
corporations, but against the abuse of corporate power; 
not against enterprise and prosperity, but against the 
unfair and fraudulent devices of selfish greed. 

The honest poor man who has felt the crushing power 
of unfair wealth may take heart, for the most powerful 
personality of our generation, from the vantage ground of 
the greatest office of our land, is leading the battle in his 
behalf ; the honest rich man who fears that property may 
be endangered and prosperity checked may calm his fears ; 
not a single principle is invoked in this warfare against 
corporate wrongdoing that has not for centuries been 



11 

familiar to the common law of England and America; 
no control is asserted over business which was not rec- 
ognized and approved in the days of Mansfield and 
Eldon, Marshall and Kent; but to exercise that same 
measure of control under the new conditions of our day 
new agencies and new methods have had to be provided 
, by law and sanctioned by the courts. 

For the accomplishment of this due measure of con- 
trol, which from time immemorial our laws have recog- 
nized as necessary, the Government of the United States 
has taken up the task where the several States have 
failed, and is performing and purposes to perform its 
duty not beyond but to the full limit of its constitutional 
power. 

The structure of our prosperity will not be weakened, 
it will be made strong and enduring by removing with the 
care of the experienced builder the rotten timbers of 
disobedience to law and disregard of morality. 

The Republican Congress has stood loyally by the 
President; the act creating the Bureau of Corporations, 
the act expediting the trial of trust cases, the antirebate 
act, the act for the regulation of railroad rates have made 
possible redress which was impossible before. Under 



12 
the direction of two successive Attorneys-General of the 
first order of abihty, sincerity, and devotion, in hundreds 
of courts, incessant warfare has been waged and is being 
waged under the Federal laws against coroporate wrong- 
doers. 

The Northern Securities Company, which sought to 
combine and prevent competition between two great con- 
tinental railroads, has been forced to dissolve by the 
judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States. 
The methods of the Beef Trust in combining to suppress 
competition in the purchase of live stock and the sale 
of meat has been tried and condemned, and the trust 
has been placed under injunction to abandon those prac- 
tises by judgment of the Supreme Court. 

The combination of paper manufacturers in the ter- 
ritory from Chicago to the Rocky Mountains has been 
dissolved by the judgment of the Supreme Court, ana 
the combination has been abandoned and the price of 
white paper in that territory has gone down 30 per cent. 
The Retail Grocers' Association in this country has been 
dissolved by decree of the court. The elevator combi- 
nation in the West has been dissolved in like manner. 



1 



13 
The salt combination west of the Rocky Mountains has 
been dissolved by decree of the court. 

The Wholesale Grocers' Association in the South, the 
meat combination and the lumber combination in the 
West, the combination of railroads entering the city of 
St. Louis to suppress competition between the bridges and 
ferries reaching that city, the Drug Trust, which sup- 
presses competition all over the country, are being vig- 
orously pressed in suits brought by the Federal Govern- 
ment for their dissolution. 

The salt combination has been indicted and convicted 
and fined for failing to obey the judgment of dissolution. 
The Beef Trust has been indicted for failing to obey the 
injunction against them, and have been saved so far only 
by a decision that they had secured temporary immunity 
by giving evidence against themselves. One branch of 
the Tobacco Trust is facing an indictment of its cor- 
porations and their officers in the Federal court in New 
York, and the other branches are undergoing investiga- 
tion. The lumber combination in Oklahoma is under in- 
dictment. 

The Fertilizer Trust, a combination of thirty-one cor- 
porations and twenty-five individuals to suppress and fix 



14 
prices, has been indicted, the indictments have been sus- 
tained by the courts and the combination has been dis- 
solved. The ice combination of the District of Colum- 
bia is facing criminal trial. Special counsel are investigat- 
ing the coal combination, and special counsel are inves- 
tigating the Standard Oil combination. 

Three of the causes won in the Supreme Court of the 
United States have furnished decisions of the utmost 
importance. 

In the Tobacco Trust case of Hale v. Henkel, the Su- 
preme Court denied the claim of the trust corporations 
to be exempt under the Constitution from furnishing tes- 
timony against themselves by the production of their 
books and papers before a Federal grand jury. Thus the 
protection of secrecy for corporate wrongdoing is beaten 
down. 

In the Northern Securities case the Supreme Court held 
that a wrong accomplished by means of incorporating in 
accordance with the express provision of New Jersey 
statute was just as much a violation of Federal law 
as if there had been no incorporation. Thus the State 
rights defense of protection from favoring State statutes 
is beaten down. 



15 

In the Beef Trust case the Supreme Court held that, 
although the business of manufacture was carried on 
within the limits of a single State, yet the purchase of the 
raw material in different States and the sale of the fin- 
ished product in different States brought the business 
within the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution 
and gave the Federal Government authority over St. 
Thus the defense that the State alone can deal with man- 
ufacturing corporations, however widespread their busi- 
ness, is beaten down. 

The obstacles to the enforcement of the Federal anti- 
trust act thus removed are obstacles which stood in the 
way of all proceedings, and they had to be cleared away 
before any proceedings of the same character against the 
same classes of corporations could be successfully main- 
tained. They have been removed, not by newspaper 
headlines and denunciation, but by skill, ability, and en- 
ergy of the highest order. 

After the Elkins antirebate law was passed by Con- 
gress in 1903 it was supposed, and the Interstate Com- 
merce Commission reported, that the railroads had sub- 
stantially abandoned giving rebates. Their good resolu- 
tions do not seem, however, to have lasted. The struggle 



16 
for business enabled the shippers soon to secure a re- 
newal of rebates, or, by ingenious devices, advantages 
equivalent to rebates. 

Thereupon the Department of Justice began active 
prosecutions for the enforcement of the law. Fifty-three 
indictments have been found against hundreds of de- 
fendants and covering many hundreds of transactions. 
There have been fourteen criminal convictions. Fourteen 
individuals have been fined to the gross amount of $66,- 
125. Nine corporations have been fined to the amount 
-of $253,000. Thirty-five indictments are ready for trial 
in their regular order upon the court calendar. 

The original statute provided only for punishment by 
fine. Last winter it was amended by providing for pun- 
ishment by imprisonment, and, if the fines imposed under 
the original law shall not prove to have stopped the 
practice, we shall see whether fear of the penitentiary 
under the amendment will not do so. 

Under this statute also it was necessary to sweep away 
defenses which stood as barriers to general prosecution, 
and in the New York, New Haven and Hartford Rail- 
road case, decided by the Supreme Court February 19 
of this year, and the Milwaukee Refrigerator Transit 



17 

case, decided in the seventh circuit on the 31st of May of 
this year, the courts have held that the substance and not 
the form is to control in the application of the statute, and 
that, however the transaction may be disguised, an un- 
lawful discrimination can be reached and punished. The 
way is therefore cleared for all other prosecutions. 

The railroad-rates act, which was the subject of such 
excited discussion during the last session of Congress, 
has already justified itself. Since the passage of the act, 
less than five months ago, there have been more volun- 
tary reductions of rates by our railroads than during the 
entire nineteen years of the previous life of the Interstate 
Commerce Commission. On the single day of the 29th 
of August, 1906, two days before the act went into 
force, over five thousand notices of voluntary reduction 
of rates were filed with the Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission by the railroads of the United States. 

Overcapitalization is an evil peculiarly within the con- 
trol of State governments, and one for which we ought 
to have in every State capital a man who can do what 
Mr. Hughes has shown himself capable of doing; but 
the Federal Government through the Bureau of Corpora- 
tions is going far on the road to a cure by getting at the 



18 

truth and dispelling the darkness under the cover of 
which the evil has grown. 

Nor should other evils with which the Federal Govern- 
ment is grappling be forgotten — the pure food act and the 
meat inspection act of the last session of Congress are pro- 
tecting the food of the people against fraud and adulter- 
ation and contamination ; justice from the employer to 
the employed is advanced by the wise employer's liability 
act of the last session; the Federal contractor's eight- 
hour labor law, too long ignored, is being vigorously en- 
forced and every week come reports of new convictions 
for its violation; the safety-appliance law, discredited in 
the lower courts, has been taken by the Government inter- 
vening in aid of an injured employee to the Supreme 
Court of the United States in a suit against the Southern 
Pacific Railroad Company, and has been established upon 
a sure foundation by the decision of that great court. 

All this has not been easy; it has required not merely 
skill and ability and patient industry and the tremendous 
personality of the President, against all powerful in- 
fluences urging on Congress and lawyers and courts, 
but it has required and still requires persistency, long- 



19 

continued and constant effort, a deliberate, settled, and 
unvarying policy. 

That policy is now before the American people for 
their approval or disapproval, and it is confronted by two 
dangers. 

The first danger is lest the people should refuse to re- 
turn a majority of Republicans in the House of Repre- 
sentatives, which has stood so loyally by the President, 
and should return a Democratic majority which will be 
in opposition to the President. Do not be deceived about 
that. Under our system of government, effective, affirma- 
tive governmental action requires the cooperation of both 
President and Congress ; that cooperation can be had 
only with a House of Representatives of the President's 
own party. It can not be had by rejecting and punish- 
ing the Members of the House who have been working 
with the President in the past. 

A Democratic House, in inevitable conflict with a Re- 
publican Senate, would not really help the Democratic 
party, but it would hinder, embarrass, weaken, and dis- 
hearten the President and his assistants in carrying on 
the policy in which they are engaged. Independent and 
patriotic Democrats equally with Republicans ought to 



20 

avoid a result so disastrous to our country. 

It would be unpatriotic to deprive our government of 
the help and this State of the credit found in the able 
and experienced service of our respected and beloved 
Congressman, James S. Sherman. 

The second danger is, lest in this greatest of States, 
the President's own State, the voters shall reject Mr. 
Hughes, who was the President's own choice for the 
nomination, who by his character and his achievements 
has shown himself fit and competent in the great office 
of governor of this State to help hold up the President's 
hands and to carry on in the State the same policy that 
the President is carrying on in the nation, and should 
elect to that great office a violent and unworthy dema- 
gogue in the person of Mr. Hearst. 

What evidence has Mr. Hearst produced of his fitness 
for this office? 

Of his private life I shall not speak further than to 
say that from no community in this State does there 
come concerning him that testimony of lifelong neigh- 
bors and acquaintances to his private virtues, the excel- 
lence of his morals, and the correctness of his conduct 



21 

which we should hke to have concerning' the man who 
is to be made the governor of our State. 

What evidence comes from his pubhc career? He 
has been a Member of Congress from New York City, 
and he owed his office to a Tammany organization and 
Tammany votes in a Tammany district; but he has been 
an absokite cipher in Congress. That is his entire pubHc 
career. 

He is really known to us solely as a young man, very 
rich by inheritance, who has become the owner of a num- 
ber of sensational yellow journals; he has taken in his 
newspapers the popular side upon all questions relating 
to labor and corporations and has sustained it by much 
violent denunciation and many falsehoods, and he has 
been a persistent seeker for office on the strength of tak- 
ing the popular side; he has published whatever he 
thought would please the working people for the purpose 
of getting the labor vote. It is difficult to believe that 
the hard-headed, shrewd, workingmen of America will 
give him much credit for that. 

There is, however, affirmative evidence of Mr. Hearst's 
unfitness for the great office of governor. You will per- 
ceive that to the remedy of corporate wrongs for which 



22 
he offers himself two things are necessary — first, intelH- 
gent and well-devised legislation, which shall strip from 
the wrongdoing corporate managers the advantage of 
laws made under their influence to facilitate their prac- 
tices, which shall clearly prohibit their wrongful acts, 
and which shall provide the machinery and procedure 
and the necessary agencies for enforcing those laws, 
and, second, the judicial enforcement of the laws, which 
requires upright and courageous judges who will ad- 
minister the laws without fear or favor, uninfluenced by 
wealth or popularity or personal friends or political 
bosses. 

Underlying both of these and necessary to both is po- 
litical purity, for without that neither legislatures nor 
courts can be pure. 

How stands Mr. Hearst's record as to political purity ? 
Why, he comes to us covered all over with the mark of 
Tammany and Tammany's leader, Murphy, whom he 
himself has denounced as a scoundrel and a thief; he 
comes to us not answering to the call of the people of 
the State, not as the honest candidate of the Democratic 
party of the State, but nominated by his own procure- 
ment, through as shameful a deal with the boss of Tam- 



23 
many as ever disgraced the political history of the State 
— a deal under which a great body of the regularly elected 
delegates to the Democratic convention were unseated 
and, in their absence, the nomination of Mr. Hearst was 
made by the solid vote of the Tammany delegation. 
\ Can hypocrisy go further than the willing beneficiary 
, of Tammany Hall preaching political purity? 

How stands his record as a legislator? He has had 
opportunity to prove his capacity and sincerity in that 
field. Representatives are sent to Congress to attend to 
the business of the country; there are hundreds of mem- 
bers of both parties working upon that every day of 
every session in the performance of their duty ; the in- 
terests of the country can not be cared for in any other 
way ; Mr. Hearst was sent to Congress to do that ; he had 
an opportunity then to show how much sincerity there 
was in all the talk of his newspapers about reforms and 

better government. 

y 

What did he do? Why, he did nothing; during the 

three years that he has been in Congress that body has 

been in session 467 days; there have been 185 recorded 

votes by yea and nay; he was present and voting at but 

23, and present without voting at 2, leaving 160 out of 



24 
the 185 roll calls from which he was absent, and 442 out 
of the 467 days of legislative session when there is no 
evidence of his presence ; his voice was heard in that Con- 
gress in those three years but once, and that was for ten 
minutes in a personal explanation regarding an article 
published in the New York American; he did not even 
contribute a motion to adjourn to the business of Con- 
gress, 

He is so rich that the $15,000 paid him for that ne- 
glected service may seem of no consequence, but no 
honest poor man would have thought it right to take it. 
Others doubtless did the work Mr. Hearst was sent to 
Washington to do; but it is of public interest to know 
that this man, who offers himself for a great public office 
on the strength of what he has printed in his newspaper 
about legislative reforms and the duties of others,, totally 
failed to perform his own duty and proved a worth- 
less public servant in a legislative office — the only office 
he has ever held. 

How does he stand regarding the courts. There, in- 
deed, if he is to be taken at his own estimate he should 
be found inflexible; an independent judiciary should be 
his dearest hope. As to that he has had a great oppor- 



25 
tiinity, for this is an exceptional year of judicial elec- 
tions; ten new justices of the supreme court are to be 
elected in the city of New York. How has he used his 
new political power concerning them? Why, he has 
made another bargain with Murphy, under which Mur- 
phy has named six of them and Hearst has named four! 

Six justices of the supreme court named by Charles 
F. Murphy, the boss of Tammany Hall, by agreement 
with William R. Hearst, the self-declared reformer : If 
lie thus delivers the power over our courts to the man 
whom he declares to be a thief and a scoundrel for the 
sake of getting votes for the governorship, what would 
he, as governor, do for the sake of getting votes for the 
Presidency ? 

His own corporate management shows the insincerity 
of his professions. Not only does he conduct his ex- 
tensive newspaper business through corporations, but he 
has established separate corporations for separate news- 
papers and he has established a holding corporation to 
hold the stock of these separate corporations, and Mr. 
Hughes has plainly shown that he has juggled with these 
different incorporations to escape his just share of public 



26 
taxation and to hinder and defeat the prosecution of just 
claims against him. 

It is seldom indeed that a man so young, whose public 
career has been so brief, so small ^ portion of whose life 
is known at all to the public, has furnished such con- 
cincing proofs of his unfitness for office. 

But the worst of Mr. Hearst is that with his great 
wealth, with his great newspapers, with his army of paid 
agents, for his own selfish purposes, he has been day by 
day and year by year sowing the seeds of dissension and 
strife and hatred throughout our land; he would array 
labor against capital and capital against labor ; poverty 
against wealth and wealth against poverty, with bitter 
and vindictive feeling; he would destroy among the great 
mass of our people that kindly and friendly spirit, that 
consideration for the interests and the rights of others, 
that brotherhood of citizenship which are essential to 
the peaceful conduct of free popular government ; he 
would destroy that respect for law. that love of order, 
that confidence in our free institutions which are the 
basis at once of true freedom and true justice. 

The malignant falsehoods of these journals, read by the 
immigfrant in his new home where none can answer them. 



27 
are making him hate the people who have welcomed him 
to liberty and prosperity, to abundant employment, to 
ample wages, to education for his children, to independ- 
ence for his manhood such as he has never known before. 

It is not the calm and lawful redress of wn-ongs which 
he seeks, it is the turmoil of inflamed passions and the 
terrorism of revengeful force; he spreads the spirit, he 
follows the methods and he is guided by the selfish mo- 
tives of the revolutionist ; and he would plunge our peace- 
ful land into the turmoil and discord of perpetual con- 
flict- out of which the republics of South America are 
now happily passing. 

Does anyone question the justice of these statements? 
Then let him turn to the pages of the newspapers through 
the ownership of which Mr. Hearst is pressing his politi- 
cal fortunes. 

What public servant honored by the people's trust has 
he not assailed with vile and vulgar epithets ; what branch 
of our free Government has he not taught his readers 
to believe a corrupt agency of oppression ! 

Listen to this from the Journal : 

"It is the sad duty of the Journal to announce to the 
people of the United States that their President, Wil- 



28 
Ham McKinley, has deliberately tricked Congress and 
the country. * * * 

"McKinley and the Wall Street Cabinet are ready to 
surrender every particle of national honor and dignity. 

"Congress and the people of the United States have 
been fooled, tricked and deceived from the beginning to 
the end." 

And to this : 

"The Board of Elections has already begun its dis- 
graceful and discreditible work. It has allowed the 
People's petitions intrusted to its care to be marked and 
mutilated and destroyed. It has thrown out petitions 
by the score, and its action has been sustained by the 
courts even as the courts last year decided that you, as 
citizens, had no right to have your votes honestly counted, 
but must abide by any returns, no matter how false, of 
corrupt election officials." 

And to this : 

"The effort is being made now by the criminal trusts 
to crush out the power of the people in the American 
Government. These trusts control your parties, control 
your primaries, control your public officers, and deny 
you the right to any government that will express the 



29 

popular will. You are deserted and betrayed by the 
public officers that should sustain you, and by the so- 
called free press that should support you.'' 

Joseph H. Choate, the leader of the American bar. 
whose honored and distinguished career is known the 
world over, has been the pride of all true Americans, is 
stigmatized as "a servile lickspittle of corporations." 

Fulton Cntting, ideal citizen, leader in philanthropy 
and independent politics, as a "worthless poodle." 

Edward M. Shepard, the foremost advocate of civic 
virtue in the Democratic politics of New York City, as 
a "corporation lawyer." 

William T. Jerome, the Democrat of independence 
above all others, as a "political Croton bug." 

Timothy L. Woodruff, twice elected Lieutenant Gov- 
ernor of the State, Chairman of the Republican State 
Committee, as standing "for everything rotten in Re- 
publican politics." 

Charles A. Towne, radical Congressman, as "a rat." 

Richard Watson Gilder, the leader of the tenement 
house reform of New York, as having "no more manli- 
ness than an apple blossom." 



30 

Thomas Taggart, Chairman of the Democratic Na- 
tional Committee, as "a plague spot in the community 
spreading vileness." 

Secretary Bonaparte as "a cab horse — a snob." 

Senator Knox, the Attorney General who brought 
and won the suit against the Northern Securities Com- 
pany, as having "Coal Trust guilt for a pillow.'' 

George B. McClellan, Congressman, Mayor of New 
York, and worthy heir of an honored name, as a "fraud 
Mayor," "office thief," and "the dead cat in the City 
Hall." 

Alton B. Parker, Chief Justice of the State, candidate 
of the Democratic party for the Presidency, as "a cock- 
roach, a waterbug." 

John Sharpe Williams, leader of the Democratic party 
in the House of Representatives, as "a railroad at- 
torney." 

Joseph G. Cannon, Speaker of the House of Repre- 
sentatives — the honest, plain typical American, as being 
"as little scrupulous in politics as a fox in a barnyard." 

Charles W. Fairbanks, Vice-President of the United 
States, as "a Wall Street speculator." 

John Hay, the great Secretary of State, the cherished 



31 
friend of Lincoln — noble, pure, virile American, lover 
of his country and his kind, whose authorship has 
adorned our literature and whose wise, strong statesman- 
ship has lifted high the power and prestige of America 
throughout the world, is described as "a guy in a ruff 
and a red coat." 

To Thomas B. Reed, the great Speaker of the House, 
he writes in a published letter : "You divide McKinley's 
infamy with him and so make his load the easier. By 
the same token you have become a toad to the public eye ; 
you grow to be looked upon as a thing loathsome; your 
name becomes a hissing and a reproach, and your deeds 
a stench in the nostrils of men." 

Grover Cleveland, twice President of the United 
States, is described as "no more no less than a living, 
breathing crime in breeches." 

Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, 
is called "a loose-tongued demagogue," "a woman killer," 
"a flagrant tax dodger," "a player to the colored gallery," 
"a man with the caste feeling," one who "has sold him- 
self to the devil and will hve up to the bargain." 

Once only has this method of incendiary abuse wrought 
out its natural consequence — in the murder of Presi- 



32 
dent McKinley. For years, by vile epithet and viler car- 
toons, the readers of the Journal were taught to be- 
lieve that McKinley was a monster in human form, whose 
taking off would be a service to mankind. Let me 
quote some of these teachings : 

"McKinley condones the treacherous murder of our 
sailors at Havana and talks of his confidence in the 
honor of Spain. He plays the coward and shivers white- 
faced at the footfall of approaching war. He makes an 
international cur of his country. He is an abject, weak, 
futile, incompetent poltroon." 

"McKinley, bar one girthy Princeton person, who came 
to be no more or less than a living, breathing crime in 
breeches, is therefore the most despised and hated crea- 
ture in the hemisphere; his name is hooted; his figure is 
burned in effigy." 

"The bullet that pierced Goebel's chest 
Cannot be found in all the West ; 
Good reason, it is speeding here 
To stretch McKinley on his bier." 

And this, in April, 1901 : 

"Institutions, like men, will last until they die: and 



33 

if bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only 
by killing, then the killing must be done." 

And this, in June, 1901 : 

"There has been much assassination in the world, 
from the assassination of some old rulers who needed 
assassination to the assassination of men in England, 
who, driven to steal by hunger, were caught and hanged 
most legally. * * * 

"Is there any doubt that the assassination of Marat 
by Charlotte Corday changed history to some extent? 
What proof is there that France would have settled down 
into imperial Napoleonism and prosperity if Marat, the 
wonderful eye doctor, had been allowed to live to retani 
his absolute mastery of the Paris populace? * * * 

"If Cromwell had not resolved to remove the head of \ 
Charles I from his lace collar, would England be what I 
she is to-day — -a really free nation and a genuine re- / 
public ? 

"Did not the murder of Lincoln, uniting in sympathy 
and regret all good people in the North and South, hasten 
the era of American good feeling and perhaps prevent 
the renewal of fighting between brothers? 

"The murder of Caesar certainly changed the history 



34 
of Europe, besides preventing that great man from ulti- 
mately displaying vanity as great as his ability. 

When wise old sayings, such as that of Disraeli about 
assassination, are taken up it is worth while, instead of 
swallowing them whole, to analyze them. We invite 
our readers to think over this question. The time de- 
voted to it will not be wasted." 

What wonder that the weak and excitable brain of 
Czolgosz answered to such impulses as these! He never 
knew McKinley; he had no real or fancied wrongs of 
his own to avenge against McKinley or McK'inley's 
government; he was answering to the lesson he had 
learned, that it was a service to mankind to rid the earth 
of a monster ; and the foremost of the teachers of these 
lessons to him and his kind was and is William Randolph 
Hearst with his yellow journals. 

The offence is deepened by the revolting hypocrisy 
which, to avert public indignation when the fatal blow 
had been struck and that strong and gentle spirit had de- 
parted, lauded the dead President to the skies, and said 
of him in the New York Journal : 

"Nowhere in the history of great men's lives, or of 
great men's deaths, can be found such resignation and 



35 
deep religious faith as marked the last hours of William 
McKinley. He faced the other world and the other life 
with the quiet, confident hope of a man who had done his 
best. Slowly the heart's strength died out. It had car- 
ried him through two wars, through many political bat- 
tles, through many long days of toil, through many years 
of hard work and serious purpose. He began life as 
a simple Christian citizen. He worked hard. He in- 
terested himself in his country's welfare. He succeeded ; 
he reached the highest place in the nation. He exercised 
and represented the greatest of earthly powers. He 
was called a second time to the highest position that men 
can give to any man. He ended his life as he began it — 
a simple, Christian citizen." 

Is there no one left who loved McKinley? 

Are there no working men left in New York who 
can not see with satisfaction honors heaped upon the man 
who is not guiltless of McKinley's death? 

The same kind of teaching is being continued now 
month by month and day by day in the Hearst journals. 
Its legitimate consequence, if continued, must be, other 
weak dupes playing the role of Czolgosz ; other McKin- 
leys stretched upon the bier; discord and bloody strife 



36 

in place of the reign of peace and order throughout our 
fair land. It is not the spirit of Washington and of 
Lincoln ; it is the spirit of malice for all and charity to- 
wards none ; it is the spirit of anarchy, of communism, 
of Kishinef and of Bielostok. 

Men of New York, do you love your country? Are 
you not proud of your country? Are not its liberty, 
its justice, its equal laws, the best that weak and erring 
men have ever yet attained in this world? Have not 
those of you who have come to us from other lands found 
better conditions of life, better employment, better wages, 
greater personal independence and dignity, better op- 
portunities for your children than ever before? Do you 
wish to join your voices to that which declares this 
freest of republics, this foremost result of government by 
the people, to be all vile and rotten and disgraceful ? 

The public knows the character of Mr. Hearst only by 
the newspapers he publishes, and God forbid that we 
should set up in the high station of Governor of New 
York, for the admiration and imitation of our children, 
the man whose character is reflected in the columns of the 
New York Journal and the New York American. 

The immediate and necessary effect of Mr. Hearst's 



37 

election would be to deprive the President of the moral 
support of the State of New York ; it would be to 
strengthen the President's enemies and opponents and to 
weaken and embarrass him in the pursuit of his policy. 

The election of this violent extremist would inevitably- 
lead to a reaction against all true reform and genuine 
redress of grievances. There is no enemy of true reform 
so fatal as sham reform ; there is no enemy of the sincere 
and faithful public servant who is seeking by patient 
and well directed effort to frame and to enforce just 
laws, like the selfish agitator who is seeking his own ad- 
vancement ; there is no ally of unscrupulous wealth so 
potent as the violent extremist who drives good, honest 
and conservative men away from the cause of true re- 
form by the violence of his words and the intemperance 
of his excessive proposals. 

I beg the working men of New York who may hear 
or read my words to think upon these questions. Do 
you believe in President Roosevelt? Do you agree with 
his policy in pursuing and preventing corporate wrong- 
doing? Do you wish that he may be able to continue 
that policy with power and success? 



38 

If you do, then help him by your votes, 

I say to you, with his authority, that he greatly de- 
sires the election of a Republican House of Representa- 
tives to work with him in the next Congress ; I say to you, 
with his authority, that he greatly desires the election 
of Mr. Hughes as Governor of the State of New York; 
I say to you, with his authority, that he regards Mr. 
Hearst as wholly unfit to be Governor, as an insincere, 
self-seeking demagogue, who is trying to deceive the 
working men of New York by false statements and false 
promises; and I say to you, with his authority, that he 
considers that Mr. Hearst's election would be an injury 
and a discredit alike to honest labor and to honest capital, 
and a serious injury to the work in which he is engaged 
of enforcing just and equal laws against corporate wrong- 
doing. 

President Roosevelt and Mr. Hearst stand as far as the 
poles asunder. Listen to what President Roosevelt himself 
has said of jNIr. Hearst and his kind. In President 
Roosevelt's first message to Congress, in speaking of the 
assassin of McKinley, he spoke of him as inflamed "by 
the reckless utterances of those who, on the stump and 
in the public press, appeal to the dark and evil spirits of 



39 

malice and greed, envy and sullen hatred. The wind is 
sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they 
can not escape their share of responsibility for the whirl- 
wind that is reaped. This applies alike to the deliberate 
demagogue, to the exploiter of sensationalism, and to the 
crude and foolish visionary who, for whatever reason, 
apologizes for crime or excites aimless discontent." 

I say, by the President's authority, that in penning' 
these words, with the horror of President McKinley's 
murder fresh before him, he had Mr. Hearst specifically 
in his mind. 

And I say, by his authority, that what he thought of 
Mr. Hearst then he thinks of Mr. Hearst now. 



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